Seed of Doubt

This little but groundbreaking book gives us the life histories, in their
own words, of three women who were conceived by anonymous donor insemination
(DI) and lament that they were deliberately kept in the dark about their natural
father’s identity and his family history.

In her afterword, Alexina McWhinnie, research fellow in Social Work and Law
at the University of Dundee, notes that DI was first used in animal husbandry
and then used with humans on the assumption it would prove equally “problem-free.” This
turned out not to be the case.

Bewildered Children

Joanna Rose won a major court battle in 2002, when the judges decided that
donor offspring had the right to know their genetic father. With the guarantee
of anonymity removed, the stock of donated sperm suddenly fell to an all-time
low. Evidently, paid gamete-donors feared being tracked down as fathers.

DI, writes Rose, who is pursuing a doctorate on the ethical issues the technology
raises, was first brought in “by stealth, in the face of public opposition,
as a secret practice, and then it uncloaked itself and demanded acceptance
on the basis that it existed and is expected by some.” She was “one
of the guinea-pigs” of this technology, lamenting that she was “made
to order” and “objectified as something to which someone else had
a right.”

As is usual in such cases, her birth certificate was falsified to hide the
manner of her conception. When she found out the truth at age 22, she began
to search for her father and discovered that he had been a student who regarded “his
reproductive material as on a par with blood to be donated” and had likely
fathered up to 300 children.

DI, she notes, involves a double standard. The infertile want to have “genetic
continuity,” yet expect the children they make to have “minimal
regard for their own genetic continuity.” The infertile thus intentionally
create an “underclass” who are intended to “serve the utility
and desires of others.”

If the offspring complain, they are told they should be grateful to exist.
Nine out of ten children produced by DI are never told about their origin.
Yet long before she knew the truth, Rose says she experienced what she calls “genetic
bewilderment,” in that she realized she had nothing in common with her “social
father.” Her experience is all too common among those conceived by DI.

Christine Whipp, who has been married for thirty years and has two daughters
and five grandsons, sensed from the start that her “life was misplaced.” Her
mother was at first “critical and controlling” and later openly
hostile. Whipp now realizes that her behavior “stemmed directly from
the way that she related to me as an acquisition.”

Whipp went public in the mid-1990s to urge openness about the identities
of fathers of DI offspring, hoping her own father would come forward. She did
not expect the hostility and derision of the “pro-donor gamete lobby.”

She linked up with other DI offspring around the globe and from them discovered
that divorce is commonplace in families built by assisted conception. At one
convention in Australia, only two of nineteen DI offspring had parents who
had stayed married.

The third writer, Louise Jamieson, was 32 when her mother revealed to her
that she was donor-conceived. She had long felt she was “standing on
a false floor,” for she had nothing in common with her father and felt
like a failure because of the dissonance between them, which she could not
alter. From her earliest childhood, she had a deep “sense of aloneness.”

What her natural father had done seemed to her like “deliberate abandonment.” Writing
eight years later, she says she no longer feels tormented because she now has “faith
in a God who is Father.” Yet reflecting on her life, she says, “I
cannot bear to contemplate the issues of identity and selfhood to be faced
in years to come by anyone finding themselves a product of cloning.”

Some defend DI as a form of adoption, but adoption, she argues, is an “accidental,” meant
to help children who need a home, while assisted reproduction is a “deliberately
created” situation, based on the assumption that “children can
be supplied to meet the demand of prospective parents.” DI purposely
creates fatherless children, whose very existence depends on being “deprived
of a relationship with a natural parent.”

Deliberately Cut Off

In her afterword, McWhinnie provides a learned analysis of these three histories
and assures us they are “typical,” as demonstrated by her analysis
of more than eighty adults conceived by DI. (Videos of her interviews with
DI offspring are available from her at amcwhinnie@fastmail.fm).

Who Am I? tells a story not otherwise made known in a society that views
insemination by anonymous donors as no more problematic than setting a broken
bone. Jamieson rightly speaks of it as “a deliberate action, endorsed
by the State and executed by the medical establishment” that cuts off
the child from his natural family and is premised on the natural father and
mother never meeting. This is animal husbandry adapted for the Brave New World.

For information on the book, write the Idreos Education Trust at idreostrust@hotmail.co.uk.

Anne Barbeau Gardiner is Professor Emerita, Department of English, John Jay College, City University of New York. She is the author of Ancient Faith and Modern Freedom in John Dryden?s The Hind and the Panther (Catholic University of America Press) and a regular reviewer for New Oxford Review.

“Seed of Doubt” first appeared in the June 2007 issue of Touchstone. If you enjoyed this article, you'll find more of the same in every issue.

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